I watched the movie for the first time solely on the strength of its title. It has that touch of magic you want a title to have, some mysterious attraction behind the words that lures you in: The Remains of the Day.

It could mean anything, but it sounded like a requiem, whatever is left after everything else has gone away. Life imparts that feeling, always going away but leaving time to do what you wanted to do; the remainder will give you that much, at least. I wanted to find out what remained. By now I have watched the movie twenty times if I have watched it once. It is safe to say I like it.

Two instances had led me from movie to book, which I had been vaguely aware of, having assumed the movie’s legendary producers, Merchant and Ivory, mined the most value out of a minor story. I was wrong: the book had done nearly all of the work.

The first signpost on the road to the novel popped up during a conversation consisting largely of myself haranguing on what made the movie better than many others, when a friend mentioned he had heard the book was excellent too, but different from the movie.

That turned out to be partially right. The book is better than excellent, but the movie is a near-exact copy. Almost nothing changed. The book gives you more, but not a lot more. It must be one of the best adaptations ever made and a semi-rare case where an author is happy with what changes were hacked onto his art.

The second occurrence, which saw me the rest of the way home, was when its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Several months after that event transpired I had walked into a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Ishiguro’s books were laid out on a table in front of the shop. I bought a copy. Why not, am I too good to try the man who won a Nobel Prize? I read it in two sittings and sat down to write this . . . . . review . . . . . this salute . . . . . this homage. I do not know what this is, but I am driven to write it.

The bare bones of the story consists of learning what a professional butler serving in the manor house of an English Lord Darlington heard and saw over the course of his thirty years loyal service. Odd, yes, and maybe on its face a boring subject, but it covers the period following World War I and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, finishing about ten years after the conclusion of World War II. Much of this happens right under the nose of the butler, Stevens, with him a wallflower to astonishing, century-shaping machinations.

The butler is an odd character. One of the oddest I have ever encountered. He has lived by a simple credo stating that a truly great butler must at all times: “Be possessed of a dignity in keeping with his position.”

This foggy maxim, under Steven’s interpretation, becomes an effective call both to an almost complete amorality, and the comprehensive suppression of any normal emotional interaction with life. As he states to the housekeeper Miss Kenton: a man can call his life well lived only after he is certain he has effectively annihilated himself in the service of his employer.

“My vocation will not be fulfilled until I have done all I can to see his lordship through the great tasks he has set himself. The day his lordship’s work is complete, the day he is able to rest on his laurels, content in the knowledge that he has done all anyone could ever reasonably ask of him, only on that day, Miss Kenton, will I be able to call myself, as you put it, a well-contented man,” Stevens explains to a fairly stunned Miss Kenton.

Miss Kenton, by the way, is a fine woman, and she is in love with Stevens. And Stevens, if he had access to his own emotions, would have realized he was in love with her, too. But he never could get there. It is one of the devastating narrative threads in the book.

Having as his only passion in life the belief in his credo, Stevens leads the most unscratchably blank-slate-of-an-existence imaginable, learning nothing about human nature and truly getting to know no-one: not Miss Kenton, not his father, not Lord Darlington. It is the English emotional reserve, which Stevens is conscious of as a high virtue, taken to an almost absurd but completely believable extreme.

The more Stevens cares about someone, the further his emotions run from him and,even more, the less he is able to discern what is happening or evaluate what he is seeing and hearing. He becomes an almost imbecile. Silent. Inarticulate. His belief becomes for him a perfect training in how to lose the forest for the trees, how to actively cultivate against the ability to think for oneself. I told you he was an odd sort of chap. Steven’s Lord and Master, Darlington, a World War I veteran and an honorable man who lives his life by the old-school English notions of honor and fair play, is slowly duped over the course of the 1920s and 1930s by hungry, aggressive Germans working to convince him that their severe punishment following World War I had been too harsh.

Whether or not this is true does not matter to this story, but what is important is that Darlington is slow-cooked into a fully finished Nazi Collaborator, believing all along he had merely been helping the German people get their economy back on its feet. He never thought it would lead to war. But both he and his family’s good, old name are disgraced, and Steven’s should have seen it coming. “Tell me, Stevens, don’t you care at all?” Mr. Cardinal asks the Butler one night. Cardinal is an intelligent young man, a warm friend to Stevens, and happens to be Lord Darlington’s God Son, the child of a now-deceased Army veteran Darlington had served with in the Great War.“Good God, man, something very crucial is going on in this house. Aren’t you at all curious?” Cardinal asks the butler while unsuccessfully trying to get him to set down his tray, sit down, and take a glass of bourbon with him as he tries to explain the very decisive situation that Stevens has been staring at but not seeing. Cardinal was working as a newspaperman and columnist in the 1930s as his godfather Darlington sped toward the abyss. He had been to Germany and knew what was happening, he sees the war coming and is horrified by Darlington’s role in aiding the Nazis. Cardinal cannot fathom how Stevens, an awfully intelligent man who has witnessed everything his employer has been doing, cannot see it too. Cardinal, being a patriotic Englishman, would serve his country’s military when World War II inevitably broke out and, as we find out later from an emotionally taciturn Stevens, was killed by the German army in Belgium. Does Stevens feel what should have been this deep personal bereavement? Cardinal was his friend, and a good lad. Maybe Stevens does, but he is not capable of showing it, not like the rest of us would be. “You care about his lordship. You care deeply, you just told me that,” Cardinal implores Stevens. “If you care about his lordship, shouldn’t you be concerned? At least a little curious? The British Prime Minister and the German Ambassador are brought together by your employer for secret talks in the night, and you’re not even curious?”

Stevens was not curious, at least not enough to betray his iron-clad credo for the life well lived.

The book’s final blow comes when Stevens reunites for a single afternoon with the former Miss Kenton, known now as Mrs. Benn for some twenty years or more. She had left Darlington Hall and married after exhausting herself trying to make Stevens see it had been he that she wanted all along. Their interactions were often excruciatingly painful as Miss Kenton exhausted herself trying to get Stevens to act like something beyond professional butlering and housekeeping existed in the world as a basis for relationships.

At one point, after Miss Kenton’s aunt had died, an aunt who had raised her up like a mother, Stevens consciously decides to offer her some emotional support. Miss Kenton, after all, had closed Steven’s father’s eyes after the man had died upstairs in Darlington Hall. Steven’s had not been able to go up to say farewell because the good lord was throwing a critically important gathering at the hall and Steven’s was in service. Miss Kenton had performed that deeply personal act of respect for the dead, and cried on his behalf. Stevens, for his part, never stopped working.

But in trying to show Miss Kenton he cared, he ended up quibbling over small details he had noticed were neglected by her housekeeping staff at Darlington Hall, and criticizing her oversight. It was an epic, bewildering failure. Miss Kenton knew he had meant to console her, she could feel it, but even she was astonished at how completely he had destroyed his ability to interact as a normal human being.

The exchange ended this way, according to Stevens, who never could quite figure out what went wrong:

“Miss Kenton looked away from me, and again an expression crossed her face as though she were trying to puzzle out something that had quite confused her. She did not look upset so much as very weary. Then she closed the sideboard, and said: ‘Please excuse me, Mr. Stevens,’ and left the room.”

Their last meeting happened on a rainy day near the sea at Weymouth where Stevens had gone to see if Mrs. Been wanted to return to Darlington Hall. In all her letters to him the most he had managed to extract was that perhaps she wanted to work together again, not that she loved him, or wanted to be near him as a human being, never that.

During this conversation Mrs. Benn explains she had three times actually walked out on her husband—a boring but decent man who she had never really loved—dreaming of a better life.

“For instance, I got to thinking about a life I may have had with you, Mr. Stevens. And I suppose that’s when I would get angry over some trivial little thing and leave. But each time I do so, I realize before long—my rightful place is with my husband. After all, there’s no turning back the clock now. One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been.”

Stevens admits that her bald-faced confession momentarily struck him dumb. He sat for a few moments trying to take it all in. But in the end his credo, his training, the gray ashes that served him for emotions, saved him. They always did. But for a passing moment he even admitted feeling something deeply.

“As you might appreciate, their implications [her words] were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed—why should I not admit it?—at that moment my heart was breaking.”

Of course, instead of following up on that realization, he bid her a dignified farewell and put her on the bus home. He did it like a gentleman, of course, oh most like a gentleman.

But the book does in the end decide to haunt you with the strong possibility that a reckoning of some kind is coming to Stevens after all these years. He has let on over the course of the story that he might know more than he is willing to say about mistakes that were made. He had not been as blind as he had made out.

“The fact is, of course, I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now–well—I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.”

Then, while sitting on a bench in front of the sea with a total stranger who had also been a butler, though only a minor one, he bursts into tears. It comes as a real shock, both because the conversation had been casual and because Stevens had never so much as smiled from a pure feeling, let alone wept.

Stevens let it pour out:

“Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really–one has to ask oneself—what dignity is there in that?”

That is a fatalistic admission of almost-Greek proportion. All his life he had cultivated “a dignity in keeping with his position,” only to find, in the end, he had had no real personal dignity at all. He had been a blind follower and the man he picked to follow had been a well-intentioned fool.

The elegiac tone of the story, the end-of-something feeling, is deeply poignant. The era itself, the century for that matter, was one where faith in a certain decency, the belief in a semi-benevolent and even Divine concern for human affairs, was butchered for keeps.

Many of the simple insights the book offers are valuable: in the prosaic way Nazi Germany was allowed to grow and come to fruition; how good men who did not think it through were exploited by bad men who did.

The story of this butler, so odd and eccentric, so unexpectedly moving. What a strange idea Ishiguro had to write it at all. The book has that magical power of great literature that forces you to ask: Where did it come from? Why is it here? Why was it dreamed up at all?

Well, why not read the book for yourself, maybe you will penetrate the mystery.

“You can take off your hats now gentlemen, and I think perhaps you’d better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”

—Stephen Vincent Benet at the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1940

In Hollywood, that mostly mythical town where F. Scott Fitzgerald died aged 44, there is nothing of the man left to visit. The house where the heart attack took him in his reading chair on a lazy Sunday afternoon is just a house on a quiet, cedar shaded street south of Sunset Boulevard. There is no sense that the great writer set off there for the studios, or worked hard hours in the mornings on his last novel, which would have been great had he finished before his heart, which he claimed had dried up years earlier, finally killed him.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, where he grew up, there is plenty left of him, and walking maps with routes have been printed up to guide you to the old haunts. If you get there, you should walk them. It is a fine, northern plains capital city anyway, and the old streets Fitzgerald wrote about sit high on the bluffs over the broad Mississippi River looking out.

The train station is there, too, where I have departed and returned many times on James J. Hill’s Empire Builder route to Chicago. Once you are catching trains out of St. Paul headed east and back you are getting pretty close to Fitzgerald and can imagine just about everything you need to about America in those big booming years after World War I. You will have the time to do it on a slow train over the prairies, just like they’d had.

Fitzgerald was born in a solid-looking brownstone with terraces of arches in old St. Paul, and 44 hustling years later he died in Hollywood, nearly forgotten and written off as a hopeless, cracked up drunk. All that came in the middle—the stuff of myth about a rise and fall and then a struggle to reclaim a place at the Big Parade—was the man’s life. Every year there is a little less of the haunted, diminishing trail of his well documented course over the earth, but the writing, at least, should last forever.

Fitzgerald was an old school craftsman, the ones who wrote their first drafts in pencil, smearing their hands across the gray lead as they went. Those handwritten pages were then banged into typescripts, which had to be whittled down once more by the draftsman who knew there was a difference between what sounded good as a concept and what could actually be built and sold. Those pages, by now already layers of drafts, went to the printer to become galleys, which were re-scrutinized and chiseled at once more. Then they became proofs and were planed, sanded, and had the finishing work done right up until the books were set for publication. Even then, he knew he could have made it better. It was never as good as it could have been.

Fitzgerald put everything he had into everything he wrote. Short stories pulled a precious bucketful from that well of experience and wisdom that filled only with time and could not, with a clear conscience, be faked. In his best years, he said he could get out eight or nine short stories before the well needed a new spring. Then, he set out with a divining rod and dug trenches until he struck home. In the end, he left 160 stories and four-and-a-half novels behind to prove he had worked. That is not something to turn your nose up at.

And there is the challenge of writing to last—it is a game for the insatiable and brutal perfectionist. Fitzgerald’s work was so well built it has outlived the literary culture he wrote for. Those days are gone, kicked over like a dying campfire by indoors people who do not need an open flame, or even understand what it had meant to those who warmed themselves around its glow.

Those who want to write to those standards now have to be even stronger than those very strong people who came before, because they will be the loneliest in the history of a lonely profession. The writing will never be as good as it was then; it can’t be. It is something like the old wooden shipbuilders who hammered together their vessels because that was the only way it was done. Now, the people who protected that ancient wisdom are dead and the new builders, through not much fault of their own, are making copies of copies without anyone with enough knowledge still around to say whether they have gotten it right.

But Fitzgerald had those two things he needed to have to survive: courage and fortitude. Nothing more is needed to prove it than the whole wreck of his life after 1930, and his writing on in the face of his own living obscurity. His dreams turned out hollow and broke up. His wife Zelda broke down and went insane. With all that had come before still alive somewhere in her deteriorating mind, she wrote him from a sanitarium: “I love you anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or any life—I love you.”

His daughter Scottie went to live with his agent and close friend, who respected Fitzgerald’s gift enough to take that burden, but it must have been a humiliation.

Then, he cracked up himself and, in financial and emotional desperation, wrote about it for money. For that, he was ripped publicly by friends and was branded definitely washed up. It was a national story that the bright light had gotten prematurely dim. The collection of essays are some of his best and rawest work. He laid his soul bare and then took the group beating an act like that always inspires. Bankrupt, artistically and actually, he left for Hollywood believing he could make it work, found a beautiful woman there for animal companionship, and then struggled to turn out good scripts for the studios. But he wrote on—he wrote for its own sake because it always was his defense against the abyss.

All this was bitter wisdom. Fitzgerald found out the price for losing your way once was years of toil to rediscover the path. That’s a lesson this generation knows as well as Fitzgerald did.

But if you want endurance, picture the man Fitzgerald in Hollywood, across from Budd Schulberg at the Brown Derby talking brass tax on screenplays for movies! This was a hobbled Poseidon helping fishermen unload the day’s catch. What about all that lay behind him? The Roaring 20s, the Boom: New York, Paris, the Riviera, Rome, Africa. Big ships back and forth across the ocean with his famous wife and daughter; brasseries on the Left Bank and hotel bars in one of the world’s greatest towns with James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford and Dos Pasos for company amongst a full-scale migration of touring Americans. The nights there, the unhealthy dissipation and the good, healthy work to save it, the novels, the acclaim, the huge fame, the photographs and newspapers following his life.

The Old Greeks used to say something about never counting a man’s life happy until it was over. Sometimes the blows come early or late, but you know one thing for certain—they are coming.

But through it all Fitzgerald stayed true, even if he could not always hew strictly to his principles. He wrote that the thing about life was not chasing pleasure, but satisfaction from doing one thing as well as you could, and making that burnt offering to the gods in exchange for immortality. The satisfaction was in the trying. Well, he did it, and the work will stand.

Fitzgerald died—like Gatsby—still in the saddle, still dreaming the big dream. Hope was never lost. He was working on a book he believed would be one of his best. And it would have been—you can read what he had—it was good. The painful irony is that his heart failed him just when he had started to really grow up. Reality had horsewhipped the idealism he had thought he needed when his flesh wasn’t scarred over or tough enough to take the whipping. It had knocked him down for much of his 30s but he had roughed over and risen up from the ashes to try again. Like Gatsby, no amount of disillusionment could kill what he had believed was important in life—he saidnever lost sight of the Green Light. ​It is a literary footnote that the writer Nathanael West died in a car wreck the day after Fitzgerald. He had been on his way back to Los Angeles to offer the man farewell. In life, they had been friends. They two went off together then, wherever people go when they die, drinking a whisky and soda for its own sake and talking about how a writer could reach higher, run faster, jump further—until one fine day . . . . .

The reason I created this blog was to weigh in every week on Ulysses while I read it. Provide real wisdom, some profound meditations on the meaning of it all. That hasn't gone to plan, but in my defense there's very little that's better for knocking down any feelings of pride in discipline you might have had than setting yourself a regular task that you have no experience with. I've never blogged before and never even really liked the idea of it—yet, here I am.

There will be more written on Ulysses than the original entry, let there be no doubt, but not tonight.

It's funny when these "blog" sentences go quickly through my head I can hear a voice reading them out and it feels like the end of every episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. I need that little blinking-keyboard soundtrack and to impart a sappy lesson to the Dear Reader before I sign off.

Here I've spent all this time scouring Earth for the answers to my questions. I've chased down the wisdom of the ages, wasted my fortune and nearly lost my sanity on women and drink. And now here, at this moment, I come to find, the answers were inside me all along. Sometimes being a kid and a genius doctor is real tough, but I think I'm going to be just fine, after all.

Tonight I wanted a quick word on Thomas Wolfe, the original. The thyroid-giant who schooled at North Carolina-Chapel Hill and died at 39 having written 10-million words over four books and driven the greatest editor this country ever had into an early grave. It wasn't Wolfe's fault, really, but Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's House spent too much time trying to talk sense into this garrulous behemoth.

Wolfe was like Steven King after 15 best sellers right out of the starting gate. LookHomeward Angel, his first novel, is physically an over-sized book and it goes 508 pages. He never wrote one shorter than that. Wolfe had some childish idea that he couldn't be edited, that he had too much to say and that only he knew how to say it. He fought for every word, which girded every paragraph that reinforced the very foundation of the novel. It all had to stay, man! I would call him the Lars von Trier of letters but Wolfe had real talent.

He was like the Hell of a Thoroughbred that every trainer bought at claiming price thinking he would be the one to break it and gather glory, but it never happened. Then, like that, Wolfe was dead. No one reads his books anymore because they're too ponderous, but there is real profundity there if you care to look.

Fittingly, Wolfe said the best things he ever said before his first book even begins. He turned over his cards early and luckily for him he was dealt the nuts Full House. Unluckily, he never learned to play that monster right. But enough about that.

First, Wolfe explains fiction. In a title page section titled: "To the Reader"

But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives - all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel.

There you have it, Wolfe on the Art of Fiction. And it was true, he only wrote about people he knew and some of them didn't like it. But only those involved knew who they were in the books, Wolfe was good enough to change the names. And he wrote well, which must have been some consolation.

Second, Wolfe writes a transcendent piece of verse on the page before the novel begins and gives out everything he brought to the world of books - which is the world itself preserved in its most permanent form. That is the best any new writer - a serious writer, that is - can do. He collects everything that came before him and finds something new to add to the old, old world. If he's good and maybe more, if he's lucky, he will stick around for quite a while. Wolfe was light on luck.

But here it is:

. . . . A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

That's James Joyce—the cold Outfit killer in the eye patch—and his dame, Nora Barnacle. When you add in their all-encompassing outlaw ethos she could be gamely called his moll. That makes these two the Bonny and Clyde of the literary scene, which in normal times is the nerdy sanctuary of introverts who need real social anxiety allowances in order to function. Of course there are plenty of fine exceptions to that general rule, but stereotypes don't come from nothing.

That picture is great for my purposes because I didn't want the first to be of James Joyce wearing coke-bottle glasses that presented him as a sort of confused, semi cross-eyed owl who'd had another mouse escape on him. There are plenty of those portraits; tend to turn people off. Joyce's eyes were awful and they got worse all his life. Had many eye surgeries in a losing effort to stay ahead of creeping blindness. Excessive reading in bad light wears down the eyes, but doctors now say the great writer likely had syphilis. The bad effects of that devilish "Cupid's disease" ruined more than one good man who enjoyed professional women in the days before penicillin was used to treat the infection.

Ironically, Barnacle wasn't a big reader and intellectually she was not outfitted—nor was she interested in—appreciating her husband's books. He liked her because she was clever like a good, practical peasant woman, had guts or not enough brains to know what she was doing took guts, and was good in the sack. She had personality qualities that were his opposite, which attracted him. Also, she didn't mind, or managed to accept, Joyce's unusual mating proclivities and obsessions that he blamed the Jesuits for instilling through their very-Catholic denial of the wholesomeness of a man's built-in drive to hide the devil as often as the urge came. In the capacity of not understanding Joyce's books, Barnacle joined millions of others. Those who read Joyce with pleasure are maybe what Stendhal meant when he mentioned the happy few.

This blog is getting off two weeks after the reading sessions began at Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, The library itself is a place that raises you up by its personality. It's a grey granite, arched hulk set back from Washington Square Park on the Near North side. Last week I approached its eastern face through big, starry snowflakes falling over the spire of Harvest Cathedral with the library framed in city-winter light beyond it, which was a sight to remember. It's stately and pompous in a way that won't put off the common slob or the scholar. It's architectures is something Spanish or Romanesque—makes one look up and contemplate the meaning behind things.